Culture of violence: Gun crime goes up by 89% in a decadeBy James SlackUPDATED: 03:42 EST, 27 October 2009 Comments (29) Share

.. Gun crime has increased five-fold in some parts of the UKGun crime has almost doubled since Labour came to power as a culture of extreme gang violence has taken hold. The latest Government figures show that the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has increased from 5,209 in 1998/99 to 9,865 last year - a rise of 89 per cent. In some parts of the country, the number of offences has increased more than five-fold. In eighteen police areas, gun crime at least doubled. The statistic will fuel fears that the police are struggling to contain gang-related violence, in which the carrying of a firearm has become increasingly common place. Last week, police in London revealed they had begun carrying out armed patrols on some streets. The move means officers armed with sub-machine guns are engaged in routine policing for the first time.

Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling, said last night: 'In areas dominated by gang culture, we're now seeing guns used to settle scores between rivals as well as turf wars between rival drug dealers. 'We need to redouble our efforts to deal with the challenge.' He added: 'These figures are all the more alarming given that it is only a week since the Metropolitan Police said it was increasing regular armed patrols in some areas of the capital'.

The gun crime figures, which were obtained by the Tories from official Parliamentary answers, do not include air weapons. But they provide the first regional breakdown of the increasing use of firearms. Lancashire suffered the single largest rise in gun crime, with recorded offences increasing from 50 in 1998/99 to 349 in 2007/08, an increase of 598 per cent.

Armed: Officers engaged in routine policing are carrying sub-machine guns for the first timeOnly four police forces - Cleveland-Humberside, Cambridgeshire and Sussex - recorded falls in gun crime. The number of people injured or killed by guns, excluding air weapons, has increased from 864 in 1998/99 to a provisional figure of 1,760 in 2008/09, an increase of 104 per cent . The figures follow a warning by Mr Grayling that U.S.-style gang culture has reached some parts of the UK.

In August, he made a controversial speech warning that a collapse of 'civilised life' had allowed a brutal drug and gun crime culture - like that of the U.S. TV show The Wire - to flourish in Britain. The hit TV series tracks the nightmare of gangs and organised crime in inner city West Baltimore and the futile efforts of police to deal with them.

The Met's decision to employ armed officers on the streets has attracted criticism. But the force, which has already begun the scheme, insists that the unprecedented tactic is a proportionate and temporary response to prevent armed gangs from controlling estates.

Trident poster campaign warning of dangers of young women and girls storing and transporting guns for othersLast month, police warned that teenage girls were now being dragged into the gun culture by hiding weapons for their boyfriends. Police are targeting girls between 15 and 19 with an advertising blitz warning them that they can expect a five-year prison sentence if they are caught. The number of women charged with firearms offences in London has increased six-fold in the past year - 12 have been charged since January. Seven of them were teenagers, including a 16-year-old arrested after a 9mm Browning self-loading pistol was found in her bedroom.

If "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed", if that is a good idea - shouldn't that go through the amendment process, instead of congress, city hall or the Holder Justice Dept.??

APU.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV., thanks supporters at his campaign celebration in Fairmont, W. Va., Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012. The call for some form of new gun limits got a boost Monday when Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a strong defenders of gun rights in Congress, said it was “time to move beyond rhetoric” and suggested he would be open to restrictions on assault rifles.

The comments by the Democratic senator and former governor, made on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” suggest even strong proponents of gun rights in Congress may begin to shift in their views after the deadly shooting rampage last week in Newtown, Conn.

Sen. Manchin got an “A” grade from the National Rifle Association and an endorsement in October from the group’s lobbying arm, which praised the senator as “committed to protecting the Right to Keep and Bear Arms guaranteed to all Americans.”

In the wake of the school shooting, Mr. Manchin said lawmakers “need to sit down and have a common-sense discussion and move in a reasonable way.”

He said that “everything has to be on the table,” and expressed astonishment that anyone would need to own the sort of assault rifle that the Connecticut shooter used.

“I don’t know anyone who in the hunting or sporting arena that goes out with an assault rifle. I don’t know anybody that needs 30 rounds in the clip to go hunting,” he said, adding that he had just returned from deer hunting with his family.

The senator said that as discussions begin in Congress, the NRA should also have a seat at the table.

The comments come as other Democratic senators say they plan to move quickly in January to introduce gun-related legislation.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), speaking Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said that on the first day of the new Congress next year, she would introduce legislation to ban assault weapons to, as she put it, get “weapons of war off our streets.”

Breaking the Gun Control Stalemate Most mass shootings involve mental illness. Legal reforms could protect society without trampling gun rights.Article Comments (736) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».smaller Larger facebooktwittergoogle pluslinked ininShare.0EmailPrintSave ↓ More ..smaller Larger By ROBERT LEIDER In addition to causing horror and outrage, Friday's shooting deaths by Adam Lanza of 27 people, including 20 school children, in Sandy Hook, Conn., are already prompting calls for new gun laws. Supporters of gun control demand restrictions on ammunition magazines and bans on so-called assault weapons—semiautomatic versions of military firearms. Gun-rights advocates see another mass shooting in a "gun-free zone" and argue for expanding the places where individuals with valid permits may carry their weapons.

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A group shares a moment of silence at the entrance to Newton, Conn.'s Sandy Hook Elementary School, Dec. 15..Neither proposal will accomplish much—except to alienate the other side. Those in favor of gun rights feel that gun-control advocates are using the deranged actions of a few as a pretext to erode the right to bear arms. Because crimes committed with assault weapons are rare, they correctly note that such bans will have little or no impact on crime.

Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, are completely frustrated with Congress's unwillingness to strengthen gun laws, despite the mounting body count over the years. For them, an assault-weapons ban is a first step toward bringing some rationality to this country's gun policy.

The result is stalemate. Gun-control supporters have not passed a major federal law since the 10-year freeze on assault weapons in 1994. Gun-rights advocates have not significantly rolled back existing federal restrictions on firearms since 1986.

This stalemate can be broken—but only if both sides retreat slightly instead of standing their ground.

In addition to guns, the common denominator in most of these mass shootings has been mental illness. Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), Jared Lee Loughner (Tucson, Ariz.), James Eagen Holmes (in the Aurora, Colo. theater), and now Adam Lanza all had significant mental health problems. As the country turns its attention to overhauling its health-care delivery system, we must discuss improving access and delivery of mental health care to those who need it. As part of this conversation, we need to update federal firearm laws as they relate to persons with mental illness—laws that currently are primitive and rooted in stereotypes.

Federal law generally prohibits the possession or acquisition of a firearm by a person "who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution." Putting aside the offensive label and legal jargon, in simple terms this means that a person is prohibited for life from possessing firearms if the person has ever been: involuntarily committed to a mental institution, or found by a court to be a danger to himself or others, found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial, or unable to manage his own affairs. It does not matter whether the person currently has a mental illness.

Federal law is both under- and over-inclusive. It is under-inclusive because plenty of people with severe mental illnesses escape the ban on possessing firearms—provided, for example, they have managed not to be formally committed to a mental institution, or found by a court to be incompetent or insane. The ban is over-inclusive because many people recover from mental illness and lead healthy and productive lives. A single involuntary commitment for a severe eating disorder at age 20 will preclude a person from possessing a hunting rifle for the rest of his life.

There is plenty of room to compromise on this issue, and in a way that may produce meaningful results. Both sides should continue to work together to update the "National Instant Check System." Gun dealers use this system to vet gun purchasers before transferring firearms. Unfortunately, despite a 2007 federal law that was supposed to mandate better reporting by states (passed in response to the Virginia Tech massacre), many states lag behind in reporting individuals who are barred from possessing firearms due to mental illness.

The lack of proper reporting by Virginia led to Seung-Hui Cho's firearm purchase, even though a judge had found Cho a danger to himself—a finding that made him ineligible to purchase firearms under federal law. Colorado's James Eagen Holmes purchased his weapons legally because he had not been formally committed despite his mental health problems. Although the information remains preliminary, Adam Lanza's mother may not have secured her guns from her son despite his apparent history of behavioral problems.

Gun-rights advocates should support efforts to strengthen the prohibition on possessing firearms by those who have mental illness. Many people with severe mental illness are too dangerous to entrust with firearms—regardless of whether they have been formally labeled under the current law as ineligible.

Mechanisms can be put in place to identify such people—and restrict their access to firearms, including expanding background checks to private sales, i.e., between individuals who are not in the business of selling firearms. Gun owners (especially close relatives of such persons, such as Adam Lanza's mother) should also be obligated to store unused firearms safely so that potentially dangerous persons and minor children do not gain easy access to them.

As for gun-control advocates, they should show more flexibility about restoring firearm rights for people who may have suffered from mental illness in the past but are no longer a danger. Instead of lobbying to expand the number of people permanently ineligible to possess any type of firearm, gun-control advocates should accept a risk-based approach.

Some patients may be permanently impaired, making them too much of a risk ever to trust with firearms. Others should be temporarily barred or restricted. But efforts to restrict the types of firearms possessed by law-abiding, healthy adults are counterproductive. They unnecessarily repel gun-rights advocates at a time when what America needs most is a united front.

A risk-based approach reflective of a person's present danger would leave law-abiding, mentally stable citizens free to pursue their hobbies. It also would modernize federal firearm laws by expanding the ability to remove firearms from those too unstable to possess them. The stalemate can be broken, but only if both sides exit their trenches.

Mr. Leider is a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.

Make no question about it. Gun control is about government control of citizens, given away by people that believe the world can be a "safe" place.

Safety is an illusion. It simply doesn't exist.Firearms are about being able to inflict violence in order to exert control. That is why the police and military have them.

Gun control advocates will throw every insult and excuse under the sun at people that see the wisdom in being able to protect oneself. They will say things like "real men don't need to hide behind a gun," but they expect their police to have them, "thirty round magazines aren't needed to hunt deer," and "guns kill."

These same liberals never want to confront the argument that many dictators around the world have killed the same people they were supposed to protect, with a body-count that tallies in the hundreds of millions of innocents killed. We have seen this same lesson repeated throughout history time and time again, yet they choose to ignore it.

Throughout the course of mankind, there has only ever been one pertinent question in regard to freedom: "Can my violence conquer your violence?"

Every shred of freedom that has ever existed has depended upon the ability to inflict violence if necessary. With examples like Stalin, Hitler, Kim il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, Amin, Pinochet, Taylor, and many, many others, we would be ill advised to forgo our inalienable right to defend ourselves from anyone, especially those that wield power simply because others "think" the world can be made into a safe place to live.

Gun control MUST be resisted at any and all costs! History has shown us as much.

I truly fear the passions are present to drive the agenda that has long laid dormant waiting for the right tragedy to exploit. The only strategy that gun owners can have is somehow shape the debate toward a compromise that will leave gun rights intact while providing the public the belief that something substantative has been done. They were waiting for the right tragedy, and boy they found it. I fear a new AWB with no sunset provision is on the horizon, how soon depends on whether Republicans will cave in the house.

Those who stridently and self-righteously lobby for the seizure of all guns by the government in America, particularly women like Sarah Brady, Barbra Streisand, Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, would do well to study the results of forced disarmament in other countries.

I have personally lived through a government-instigated disarmament of the general public, and its subsequent, disastrous consequences: From 1961 to 1977 my father (who is a white American, as are my mother, sister and I) was stationed with his family and business in Kingston, Jamaica.

Around 1972, the political situation in Jamaica had so seriously deteriorated that there were constant shootings and gun battles throughout the city of Kingston and in many of the outlying parishes (counties). In years past no one had even had to lock their doors, but now many people hardly dared venture out of their homes. This was especially true for white people, and even more especially for Americans, because of the real risk of being gunned down or kidnapped and held hostage by Jamaicans, who had become increasingly hostile towards whites and foreigners. My father took his life into his hands every morning simply driving to work. Going to the market or to do a simple errand was often a terrifying prospect. The open hatred and hostility which was directed at us seemed ready at any time to explode into violence, and indeed did so towards many people on many occasions, often with tragic or fatal results.

The Jamaican government decided that the only solution to this volatile situation was to declare martial law overnight, and to demand that all guns and bullets owned by anyone but the police and the military be turned into the police within 24 hours. The government decreed that anyone caught with even one bullet would be immediately, and without trial, incarcerated in what was essentially a barbed-wire enclosed concentration camp which had been speedily erected in the middle of Kingston. In true Orwellian fashion, the government referred to this camp as "the gun court."

My father and all of our American, Canadian, British and European friends, as well as middle class Jamaicans of all colors (locally referred to as "black," 'white," or "beige") knew that we were all natural targets of this kind of draconian government punishment. The relentless anti-American propaganda spewed forth by Michael Manley, Jamaica's admittedly pro-Castro Prime Minister, had resulted in the widespread hatred of Americans, British and Europeans by many Jamaicans. Racial hatred of whites and "beiges," as well as class hatred of anyone who appeared to have money or property, were rampant.

Consequently, we all dutifully and immediately disarmed ourselves, and handed our weapons in at the nearest police station. It was either that or be sent straight to the gun court. Even after we had disarmed ourselves, we lived in deathly fear that the cops, not known for their integrity, and well-known for their hatred of whites and Americans, would plant a gun or bullet on our property or persons.

So there we all were - government-disarmed, sitting-duck, law-abiding citizens and expatriates. Anyone can guess what happened next: the rampant and unfettered carnage began in earnest. Robberies, kidnappings, murders, burglaries, rapes - all committed by the vast populace of still-armed criminals. Doubtless the criminals were positively ecstatic that the government had been so helpful in creating all these juicy and utterly defenseless victims for their easy prey.

We've all heard the phrase, "When guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns." I can personally confirm that this statement is absolutely and painfully true, because that is exactly how the Jamaican disarmament worked. At the time of the disarmament order, I was away at boarding school in the United States. However, I remember vividly coming home for the summer. I remember the muted but pervasive atmosphere of tension and terror which constantly permeated our household, affecting even our loyal black servants, who worked for and lived with us, and whom we took care of. (Practically every household in Jamaica, except the very poorest, had live-in servants. There was no welfare or public school in Jamaica, so middle-class families became completely responsible for the well-being of their servants, who were considered to be part of the family, including taking them to the doctor, and helping to educate their children.)

I remember lying awake in bed at night, clutching the handle of an ice-pick I had put under my pillow, and listening to the screaming of car-loads of Jamaican gangs going by our house, praying that they wouldn't pick our home to plunder. The favorite tactic was for a group of thugs to roar up to a house, pile out, batter down the door and rape, steal, kill, kidnap... whatever they felt like. They knew the inhabitants had been disarmed, and that they would be met with only fear and defenselessness. My pathetic ice-pick seemed incredibly puny, but it was all I could think of. Our family didn't even own a baseball bat. I remember lying awake thinking about how our beloved dogs were old and feeble, and that they could not protect us. And that I could not protect them either.

I can barely describe the abject terror and helplessness I felt as both a white American and as a young woman during that time. Jamaica was then about 90% black. Although I was (and still am) an American citizen, my family had lived in Kingston for almost 12 years when this situation occurred, and I considered Jamaica to be my real home. Many of my friends were Jamaican. My first serious boy-friend was Jamaican. For all its faults, I loved this beautiful, suffering island dearly, and I felt like a stranger when I was away at school in America, where I was always homesick for Jamaica.

When we had first moved to Jamaica in 1960, my sister and I (both blonde and obviously white) had been able to ride our horses up into the hills, and, whenever we encountered local Jamaicans, their salutation to us was open and friendly, as was ours to them. As things deteriorated into the reign of terror, and then the government instituted overnight citizen disarmament, when we ventured outside our home, we almost always encountered hate-filled stares and hostile hisses of, "Eh, white bitch! Eh, look 'ere, white bitch!" and other unprintable epithets.

Jamaica was, in the 1970's, a country with at least 50% illiteracy and an illegitimacy rate of over 50%. If a Jamaican girl wasn't pregnant by the age of 15 or 16, she was often derisively branded "a mule," since mules, the offspring of horses and donkeys, are almost always sterile. Being a woman, let alone a white woman, in such a climate, especially after the disarmament of the citizenry by the government, was one of the most terrifying experiences one can imagine.

At that time, I had never held or fired a gun. I had rarely ever even seen a gun. No one in my family had ever learned about, used or even talked about firearms, except my father, who had been in the U.S. army. In our social circle, guns were deemed "unseemly" and "inappropriate" for polite society, and especially for young ladies. I had never given much thought to any of the Bill of Rights, let alone the Second Amendment. Yet we Americans all knew the Bill of Rights did not protect us in Jamaica, just as it hadn't applied to us at our previous station in Singapore.

My dad had fought in World War II, however, and had brought back a Luger pistol, which he had taken with him to Jamaica when we moved there after having spent 6 years in Singapore. No law had prevented his bringing a gun to Jamaica in 1960. When my dad handed that pistol and all his bullets in to the police, I vaguely realized that he was no longer allowed by the government to protect my mom, my sister or me, or our household.

I was pretty confused at the time. Terrified of being kidnapped, raped, murdered, robbed, at the same time I was still mindlessly anti-gun, because the criminals all had guns, and the government had declared guns to be contraband, and we were all terrified of being hurt by bad guys with guns, all of which somehow meant that guns must be "dangerous" and "bad" and therefore should be banned, just as the Jamaican government had decreed. As white Americans, our status was that of permanent guests in a foreign and increasingly hostile country. In fact, after 6 years in Singapore, and 12 in Jamaica, we well knew how to strive to be "model guests," which meant that questioning or challenging the Jamaican government's authority was unthinkable -- even when such government authority decreed that we be made helpless. None of us had any illusions about any "rights" to defend ourselves. We might have been able to do so with the government's blessing in the good old days, before chaos and violence and racial hatred had taken over. But now it was different. Now we were white, visible, foreign, sitting ducks in a hostile black sea. And I was a white, visible, foreign, female sitting duck.

As obedient as I was to authority, I grasped that our household was defenseless, and that I as a woman was particularly defenseless. And I realized that, had my dad still had his pistol, I would have felt much safer. I even realized that I would be willing to pick up a gun if my life were threatened. For a person who claimed to be anti-gun, these feelings really confused me.

At least eleven friends and acquaintances of my family were raped, kidnapped, murdered or robbed within about a year after the disarmament, and I believe it is a miracle that we are all still alive. I am convinced that many of these people would not have been victims had they not been disarmed by the Jamaican government. It was tragically ironic that the government had sold this whole disarmament program to us with the promise that: "We're here to help you, and this is for your own good and safety."

Because of this horrid and indelible experience, and of my interest in and undying loyalty to the American Bill of Rights, I have made it my personal business to study the history of the Second Amendment. I have studied related topics, too, such as police responsibility to citizens. It is my belief that many people believe that disarmament is no big deal, because it is the job of the police to protect us. Particularly many women seem to believe this. The media and of government authorities continue to generate pervasive and corrosive propaganda aimed at creating a helpless and disarmed populace. I used to completely believe this propaganda, but I have learned the following realities:

1. The police have no legal duty to protect individual citizens, and cannot be held responsible if they fail to do so. Even if a citizen's 911 call gets through to the emergency center, the police can simply choose not to show up, and the citizen has no legal recourse against the police. The courts have repeatedly ruled on this. As the court wrote in Bowers v. DeVito, 686 F.2d 616 (7th Cir. 1982): "There is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen. It is monstrous if the state fails to protect its residents against such predators but does not violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, or, we suppose, any other provision of the Constitution. The Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: it tells the state to let the people alone; it does not require the federal government or the state to provide services, even so elementary a service as maintaining law and order." The U.S. Supreme Court, in MU 59 U.S. 396, ruled in a similar vein as far back as 1856.

2. The police carry guns primarily to defend themselves, not to protect us.

3. Because of items 1 and 2 above, we should all consider the police to be, essentially, historians. They show up after the crime has been committed and attempt to reconstruct and document the history of the crime. If the history is satisfactorily re-constructed, then the perpetrator is apprehended (if he can be found) and then (perhaps) prosecuted. This after-the-fact law enforcement does little good for the dead or wounded crime victims.

4. Women have a particular stake in preserving the right to bear arms. There is no way to describe the helplessness a woman feels when she is disarmed and made helpless by anyone. Add to that the rage she feels when the agency who is disarming her and leaving her at the mercy of rapists, murderers, goons and thugs, is a sanctimonious government telling her that it's "for her own good."

Although there are many serious issues in today's roiling political and social stew, I believe that preserving and restoring the Bill of Rights in general, and the Second Amendment in particular, is the most pivotal and basic issue to all Americans, and particularly female Americans, even if they don't yet know it. The consummate idiocy propounded by some folks (including some women) that the Second Amendment exists only to protect sportsmen's rights is particularly ridiculous relevant to women, most of whom don't hunt, and who care more about being able to get a decent hand-gun for self-protection than a hunting rifle to pursue deer or elk.

Anyone who thinks the Bill of Rights is either "out of date," "hokey" or "needs revising" - all of which I've heard from well-meaning but tragically ignorant and complacent Americans - should try living in a country which doesn't have one. I have been there and done that, and I don't want to go through it ever again - especially not in my own native nation. So I am dedicated to preventing today's government nanny from turning, as so often has occurred in history, into tomorrow's government despot.

Finally, I implore anyone reading this, particularly women, to likewise dedicate themselves to studying this issue carefully, and to likewise taking an active stance to preserve the Bill of Rights in general and the Second Amendment in particular.

Postscript: As of the latter part of August of this year (1998), it doesn't appear that the situation in Jamaica has changed much for the better. Many Jamaicans of all colors have immigrated to America to start businesses and to escape the hopelessness of the situation in their homeland. I recently spoke with a black Jamaican named Marcus, who has opened a wonderful Jamaican restaurant in Phoenix named Likkle Montego, where I can go and eat Jamaican food, and catch the latest news from my long-lost home. When asked how things are today in Kingston, Marcus simply shook his head: "Nottin' change attahl, y'know. Everyt'ing still de same. Crime is still bad, mon. Gov'ment still de same. T'ings dere is bad and terrible, mon. Bad and terrible."

And guns are still outlawed in Jamaica. Armed criminals still terrorize disarmed citizens, since still in Jamaica only outlaws (and the government) have guns.

Like the man said: Bad and terrible, mon. Bad and terrible.

Published originally in Fall 1998, pages 16-18 of The Firearms Sentinel, (now The Bill of RightsSentinel) the quarterly publication of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO), - P.O. Box 270143, Hartford, Wisconsin, 53027 - phone: 414-673-9746; web site: http://www.jpfo.org)Please include the following republication information with any republishing:Permission is given to republish this article, as long as none of it is changed, shortened or altered, the author and JPFO are given full credit in any such republishing, and this entire republishing message, including the below message concerning Dial 911 and Die, is included. Author may be reached by writing to: Tina Terry c/o JPFO, POB 270143, Hartford, WI, 53027, or by e-mailing to question.authority@hushmail.com

For anyone wanting to know more about what the law requires of the police in regard to protecting citizens, an excellent reference book is available on this topic: Dial 911 and Die, by Attorney Richard W. Stevens, available from Mazel Freedom Press, Inc., P.O. Box 270014, Hartford, WI, 53027. See also http://www.jpfo.org. Dial 911 and Die painstakingly examines the laws of every state regarding the obligation of the police to protect citizens, and the right of citizens to sue should police fail to protect them. James Bovard, nationally syndicated columnist and author of several books, including Lost Rights, Freedom in Chains and Feeling Your Pain, all published by St. Martin's Press, says this about Dial 911 and Die: "Anyone who reads Stevens' book will realize that their right to dial 911 when in imminent peril is often worth less than a plug quarter. There are many fine police officers in this country. However, both the law and the courts have consistently held that police need not respond to citizens in deadly peril. When the government fails to respond, it is scant consolation that a policeman arrives after the crime to chalk off the body." Richard Mack, former Sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, says, "How I wish the information in this book were not true. Nevertheless, this book speaks to the irrefutable truth: police do very little to prevent violent crime. We investigate crime after the fact. I applaud Richard Stevens for his tremendous research and his courage to tell this truth."

I'll never forget doing a psychiatry rotation when we as medical students were invited to listen to an interview of a teenager with diagnosed boderline personality disorder.

It was quite chilling listening to him describing with glee in his eyes a scene from Rambo (I never could sit through the entire movie so I never verifed the scene) when Rambo holds his huge knife blade up to someone's throat and said, " I can kill you anytime I want".

This kid then stated, "I think THAT is the coolest thing I HAVE EVER SEEN!"

I don't want a ban a guns but if it does happen, damnit, we need to censure Hollywood and tax the shit out of the entertainment hypocrits who deliver huge quantities of endless violence, sadistic, gore and thrive quite well doing so.

Chronicle • December 19, 2012 The Foundation"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants." --Cesare Beccaria, quoted by Thomas Jefferson in Commonplace BookEditorial Exegesis

"What happened in Newtown is not an occasion for a national political 'conversation.' It is an occasion to reflect on why we have political conversations at all. ... It is easy, and in moments of despair such as Friday quite understandable, to scream 'more' to gun control, 'more' to the morass of airport-style security that is spreading its way across our institutions, 'more' to the diagnosis and institutionalization of the mentally ill. But it is much harder to write the laws that would have guaranteed Adam Lanza could never find a gun, or enter a school by force, or go without what diagnosis, treatment, and supervision he might have needed. And hardest of all to write them in such a way that the republic we'd be left with would still look like America in the ways we value most. This is not so say such laws cannot or should not be written -- in the field of mental health, in particular, we think there are commonsense reforms that might make tragedies such as Newtown less likely -- but merely to caution humility and care in their crafting. The need for humility is especially acute in the case of gun control. The irreducible challenge the Second Amendment poses to gun restrictionists is that it does not bestow upon the people a right they previously lacked. It proscribes the government from infringing upon a right the people already have. It is not that the people are allowed to arm. It is that the government is disallowed to disarm them. The practical consequence of living for nearly two-and-a-half centuries under the almost universally benevolent protection of the Second Amendment is a society in which there are hundreds of millions of guns, in which 47 percent of families and nearly as many Democrats as Republicans own guns, and in which the dissent over the sacrosanctity of gun rights is heard largely because of the overrepresentation in the media of the coastal, urban Left. Those upset with the order of things are welcome to try, and doomed to fail, to repeal the Second Amendment via the constitutional process. But the guns of America aren't going anywhere any time soon, and generic calls to 'do something' -- even insofar as doing something is desirable -- must reckon with this fact." --National Review

"The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available. If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive. ... Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals. In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. ... Guns are not the problem. People are the problem -- including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts. There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates." --economist Thomas Sowell

"The rifle that Lanza used, a .223-caliber Bushmaster M4 carbine, is legal under Connecticut's 'assault weapon' ban, and the federal law used the same criteria. ... Any gun that can be used for self-defense or other legitimate purposes also can be used to murder people. Guns like Lanza's, modeled after the Colt AR-15, are among the most popular rifles in America, with an estimated 3.5 million sold since 1986. Only a tiny fraction of them are ever used in crimes. ... FBI numbers indicate that rifles of any kind (not just 'assault weapons') are used in less than 3 percent of murders. Even killers with multiple victims are much more likely to use ordinary handguns than 'assault weapons.' I use those scare quotes because the very term 'assault weapon' was invented by the anti-gun lobby as a way of blurring the distinction between semi-automatic firearms, which fire once per trigger pull, and machine guns such as the selective-fire assault rifles carried by soldiers." --columnist Jacob Sullum

"An industry devoted to serving the public's right to know gives twisted and evil men the means of becoming known. This problem is not obviously amenable to a solution, and it certainly is not amenable to a legal one. A regime of media regulation that would be both effective at preventing mass shootings and consistent with the American Constitution is no easier to imagine than a regime of gun regulation that would meet the same criteria." --Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." --Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, quoted by Thomas Jefferson in Commonplace Book

"[W]hereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them; nor does it follow from this, that all promiscuously must go into actual service on every occasion. The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it." --Federal Farmer, Antifederalist Letter, No. 18, 1787

The brutal murders of 20 schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, CT, stunned the world last week. A mentally ill young man apparently discovered that his long-suffering mother was going to attempt to have him committed to a psychiatric facility; he took out his rage upon her and then his former elementary school’s faculty, staff, and students.

It was senseless. It was barbaric. As parents, it is difficult for us to cope with the thought of having our youngest beloved ripped from us by any method, much less something as abhorrent as intentional, callous murder. No decent person could feel anything but anguish for their loss.

As Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel warned us, however, there is a mentality among the opportunistic political class that demands they “never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

While America recoiled, media vultures first pounced upon the survivors while they were still in shock. Since then, they have attacked America’s lawful gun owners, of which there are roughly 100 million.

We’ve heard calls for “gun control” in recent days, including specific demands for a ban on so-called “assault weapons.” Detractors question the need for weapons “designed for war” whose “only purpose is to kill”; they insist that you “don’t need an assault rifle” for hunting deer.

This is ignorance, and further, completely misses the point. To cite something I wrote earlier in the week:

The Second Amendment was not written to protect firearms designed for the taking of game, nor firearms designed for sport or individual personal defense, except that such a purpose proves to be militarily useful.

The explicit purpose that the Second Amendment was written was so that civilians that comprised the militia and alarm list would be armed with military-capable arms to depose would-be tyrants.

I’d amend that slightly to more accurately reflect that the intention was to arm citizens with contemporary arms of military utility. To assert that the right applied merely to flintlock muskets suggests that human rights are superseded by advances in technology, which is on its face a preposterous statement. Could anyone rationally argue that freedom of speech does not apply to modern forms of communication?

The Second Amendment was written to ensure citizens had contemporary rifles of military utility, and no single rifle more accurately fits that description today than AR-15 rifles patterned after the M-16 rifle and M-4 carbine that have been the U.S. military standard for half a century.

SAN FRANCISCO – Downloading a gun's design plans to your computer, building it on a three-dimensional printer and firing it minutes later. No background checks, no questions asked.

Sound far-fetched? It's not. And that is disquieting for gun control advocates.

Rep. Steven Israel, D-NY, said the prospect of such guns becoming reality is reason enough for the renewal of the Undetectable Firearms Act, which makes illegal the building of guns that can't be detected by X-ray or metallic scanners. That law expires at the end of 2013.

At least one group, called Defense Distributed, is claiming to have created downloadable weapon parts that can be built using the increasingly popular new-generation of printer that utilizes plastics and other materials to create 3-D objects with moving parts. University of Texas law student Cody Wilson, the 24-year-old "Wiki Weapons" project leader, says the group last month test fired a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle -- one of the weapon types used in the Connecticut elementary school massacre -- which was built with some key parts created on a 3-D printer. The gun was fired six times before it broke.

Though no independent observer was there to verify the test, a short video clip showing the gun firing and breaking was posted to YouTube. Federal firearms regulators said they are aware of the technology's gun-making potential, but do not believe an entire weapon has yet been made.

"What's chilling is that last month a group of kids used a 3-D printer to actually manufacture (key parts) of the AR-15 and fire six bullets," Israel said. "When the (act) was last renewed in 2003, a gun made by a 3-D printer was like a Star Trek episode, but now we know it's real."

Even with gun control pushed to the top of the national political conversation, Wilson is steadfast about reaching his goal of making a fully downloadable gun. This weekend, he and his partners plan to print four new lower receivers -- the segment of the gun that includes the trigger, magazine and grip. He keeps three of these AR-15 parts -- one black, one white and another green -- in his tidy student apartment in Austin, TX.

While saddened by the Connecticut mass killing, Wilson said Thursday that protecting the right to bear arms by giving everyone access to guns is more important in the long term than a single horrible crime.

"Clearly what happened in Connecticut was a tragedy," he told The Associated Press. "Still, by affording the Second Amendment protection, we understand events like these will happen."

He said he discussed with his partners whether they should suspend their effort, and they all decided it was too important to stop.

Wilson acknowledged there still are many technical hurdles to creating a complete gun from a 3-D printer and provided no estimate on when his goal might be reached.

Special Agent Helen Dunkel of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which helps enforce gun laws, said the agency is familiar with Wilson's project. She didn't offer an opinion but noted there is nothing illegal about making many types of guns at home. Exceptions would be high-powered weapons like machine guns and those not detectable by airport scanners.

Advances in 3-D printing technology are fueling Wilson's goal. The printers were developed for the automobile, aerospace and other industries to create product prototypes from the same hard plastics used in toys like Legos. Hobbyists mainly use the printers to design Christmas ornaments, toys and gadget accessories.

Prices on the machines have fallen as the consumer market grows, leading to a surge in interest from people in the so-called "maker" scene. Low-end 3-D printers can now be purchased online from between $1,500-$4,000. The more high-end printers needed to make gun parts are still priced from $10,000 and up.

"The gun issue is something that the 3-D printing industry will have to address going forward," Glenn said.

Right now, most people interested in 3-D printing rent time on one. There are a number of businesses and co-ops in major cities that allow access to the machines for a nominal fee. At San Francisco's TechShop, which features a 3-D printer for its members, "assembling firearms is strictly prohibited and our staff is trained on that policy," company spokeswoman Carrie Motamedi said.

Wilson acknowledged his idea has met resistance from those active in 3-D printing.

"The early adopters of 3-D printing technology seem to be an educated, more liberal group who were against firearms to begin with," he said. Wilson said some are worried the gun project might spur regulations that will hurt or curtail their projects.

Early schematics created by Wilson's group were posted on Thingiverse, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based website that serves as a hub for 3-D printing aficionados. After the school shooting, Thingiverse took down Wilson's links.

The site's spokeswoman Jenifer Howard said its focus is "to empower the creative process and make things for good." Howard said Thingiverse's terms of service state that users cannot use the site to share content that contributes to the creation of weapons.

Wilson said the group has already posted the links on its own website.

Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology forecaster who teaches at Stanford University's engineering school, said Defense Distributed's work carries on a long tradition of tech geeks using innovation to make a political point, in this case on gun control and Second Amendment freedoms.

"If you want to get people's attention in Washington, you say something. If you want to do it in Silicon Valley, you make something," Saffo said.

He said the technology exists now for a highly motivated group to make a plastic gun on a 3-D printer that could avoid airport scanners. But the equipment is still too expensive for most people.

"Nobody right now needs to worry about the bright teenager making a gun on a printer in their bedroom," he said.

Active shooters in schools: The enemy is denialPreventing juvenile mass murder in American schools is the job of police officers, school teachers, and concerned parents

Editor's Note: Visit the Newtown Shooting special coverage page for more perspectives on active shooters in schools, including my article "Active shooters in schools: Should teachers be trained by police firearms instructors?" Have a perspective on this issue? Leave it in the comments below.“How many kids have been killed by school fire in all of North America in the past 50 years? Kids killed... school fire... North America... 50 years... How many? Zero. That’s right. Not one single kid has been killed by school fire anywhere in North America in the past half a century. Now, how many kids have been killed by school violence?”

So began an extraordinary daylong seminar presented by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a Pulitzer Prize nominated author, West Point psychology professor, and without a doubt the world’s foremost expert on human aggression and violence. The event, hosted by the California Peace Officers Association, was held in the auditorium of a very large community church about 30 miles from San Francisco, and was attended by more than 250 police officers from around the region.

Grossman’s talk spanned myriad topics of vital importance to law enforcement, such as the use of autogenic breathing, surviving gunshot wounds, dealing with survivor guilt following a gun battle, and others. But violence among and against children was how the day began, and so I'll focus on that issue here.

Related Resources:Book Excerpt: On Sheep, Wolves, and SheepdogsVisit the Killology Research Group website

Related Feature: Helping schools prepare for an active-shooter showdownSheriff Fred Wegener says that preparing schools for an active shooter is community policing at its best.“In 1999,” Grossman said, “school violence claimed what at the time was an all time record number of kids’ lives. In that year there were 35 dead and a quarter of a million serious injuries due to violence in the school. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. But we hear people say, ‘That’s the year Columbine happened, that’s an anomaly.’ Well, in 2004 we had a new all time record — 48 dead in the schools from violence. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. Let’s assign some grades. Put your teacher hat on and give out some grades. What kind of grade do you give the firefighter for keeping kids safe? An ‘A,’ right? Reluctantly, reluctantly, the cops give the firefighters an ‘A,’ right? Danged firefighters, they sleep ‘till they’re hungry and eat ‘till they’re tired. What grade do we get for keeping the kids safe from violence? Come on, what’s our grade? Needs improvement, right?”

He paused, briefly, and answered with a voice that blew through the hall like thunder, “Denial, denial, denial!”

Grossman commanded, “Look up at the ceiling! See all those sprinklers up there? They’re hard to spot — they’re painted black — but they’re there. While you’re looking, look at the material the ceiling is made of. You know that that stuff was selected because it’s fire-retardant. Hooah? Now look over there above the door — you see that fire exit sign? That’s not just any fire exit sign — that’s a ‘battery-backup-when-the-world-ends-it-will-still-be-lit’ fire exit sign. Hooah?”

Walking from the stage toward a nearby fire exit and exterior wall, Grossman slammed the palm of his hand against the wall and exclaimed, “Look at these wall boards! They were chosen because they’re what?! Fireproof or fire retardant, hooah? There is not one stinking thing in this room that will burn!”

Pointing around the room as he spoke, Grossman continued, “But you’ve still got those fire sprinklers, those fire exit signs, fire hydrants outside, and fire trucks nearby! Are these fire guys crazy? Are these fire guys paranoid? No! This fire guy is our A+ student! Because this fire guy has redundant, overlapping layers of protection, not a single kid has been killed by school fire in the last 50 years!

“But you try to prepare for violence — the thing much more likely to kill our kids in schools, the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill our kids in schools — and people think you’re paranoid. They think you’re crazy. ...They’re in denial.”

Teaching the TeachersThe challenge for law enforcement agencies and officers, then, is to overcome not only the attacks taking place in schools, but to first overcome the denial in the minds of mayors, city councils, school administrators, and parents. Grossman said that agencies and officers, although facing an uphill slog against the denial of the general public, must diligently work toward increasing understanding among the sheep that the wolves are coming for their children. Police officers must train and drill with teachers, not only so responding officers are intimately familiar with the facilities, but so that teachers know what they can do in the event of an attack.

“Come with me to the library at Columbine High School,” Grossman said. “The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have instinctively, reflexively known what to do.

"But the thing most likely to kill her kids — the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn’t have a clue what to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian’s office but she didn’t know that. So she did the worst thing possible — she tried to secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide in the library — a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It’s an aquarium, it’s a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl. What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish bowl.”

Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a fraction of the money they’d spent preparing for fire doing lockdown drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers they face, the outcome that day may have been different.

Rhetorically he asked the assembled cops, “If somebody had spent five minutes telling that teacher what to do, do you think lives would have been saved at Columbine?”

Arming Campus Cops is ElementaryNearly two years ago, I wrote an article called Arming campus cops is elementary. Not surprisingly, Grossman agrees with that hypothesis.

“Never call an unarmed man ‘security’,” Grossman said.

“Call him ‘run-like-hell-when-the-man-with-the-gun-shows-up’ but never call an unarmed man security.

"Imagine if someone said, ‘I want a trained fire professional on site. I want a fire hat, I want a fire uniform, I want a fire badge. But! No fire extinguishers in this building. No fire hoses. The hat, the badge, the uniform — that will keep us safe — but we have no need for fire extinguishers.’ Well, that would be insane. It is equally insane, delusional, legally liable, to say, ‘I want a trained security professional on site. I want a security hat, I want a security uniform, and I want a security badge, but I don’t want a gun.’ It’s not the hat, the uniform, or the badge. It’s the tools in the hands of a trained professional that keeps us safe.

“Our problem is not money,” said Grossman. “It is denial.”

Grossman said (and most cops agree) that many of the most important things we can do to protect our kids would cost us nothing or next-to-nothing.

Grossman’s Five D’sLet’s contemplate the following outline and summary of Dave Grossman’s “Five D’s.” While you do, I encourage you to add in the comments area below your suggestions to address, and expand upon, these ideas.

1. Denial — Denial is the enemy and it has no survival value, said Grossman.

2. Deter — Put police officers in schools, because with just one officer assigned to a school, the probability of a mass murder in that school drops to almost zero

3. Detect — We’re talking about plain old fashioned police work here. The ultimate achievement for law enforcement is the crime that didn’t happen, so giving teachers and administrators regular access to cops is paramount.

4. Delay — Various simple mechanisms can be used by teachers and cops to put time and distance between the killers and the kids.

a. Ensure that the school/classroom have just a single point of entry. Simply locking the back door helps create a hard target.b. Conduct your active shooter drills within (and in partnership with) the schools in your city so teachers know how to respond, and know what it looks like when you do your response.

a. Carry off duty. No one would tell a firefighter who has a fire extinguisher in his trunk that he’s crazy or paranoid.b. Equip every cop in America with a patrol rifle. One chief of police, upon getting rifles for all his officers once said, “If an active killer strikes in my town, the response time will be measured in feet per second.”c. Put smoke grenades in the trunk of every cop car in America. Any infantryman who needs to attack across open terrain or perform a rescue under fire deploys a smoke grenade. A fire extinguisher will do a decent job in some cases, but a smoke grenade is designed to perform the function.d. Have a “go-to-war bag” filled with lots of loaded magazines and supplies for tactical combat casualty care.e. Use helicopters. Somewhere in your county you probably have one or more of the following: medevac, media, private, national guard, coast guard rotors.f. Employ the crew-served, continuous-feed, weapon you already have available to you (a firehouse) by integrating the fire service into your active shooter training. It is virtually impossible for a killer to put well-placed shots on target while also being blasted with water at 300 pounds per square inch.g. Armed citizens can help. Think United 93. Whatever your personal take on gun control, it is all but certain that a killer set on killing is more likely to attack a target where the citizens are unarmed, rather than one where they are likely to encounter an armed citizen response.

Coming Soon: External ThreatsToday we must not only prepare for juvenile mass murder, something that had never happened in human history until only recently, but we also must prepare for the external threat. Islamist fanatics have slaughtered children in their own religion — they have killed wantonly, mercilessly, and without regard for repercussion or regret of any kind. What do you think they’d think of killing our kids?

“Eight years ago they came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. Do we know what they’re going to do next? No! But one thing they’ve done in every country they’ve messed with is killing kids in schools,” Grossman said.

The latest al Qaeda charter states that “children are noble targets” and Osama bin Laden himself has said that “Russia is a preview for what we will do to America.”

What happened in Russia that we need to be concerned with in this context? In the town of Beslan on September 1, 2004 — the very day on which children across that country merrily make their return to school after the long summer break — radical Islamist terrorists from Chechnya took more than 1,000 teachers, mothers, and children hostage. When the three-day siege was over, more than 300 hostages had been killed, more than half of whom were children.

“If I could tackle every American and make them read one book to help them understand the terrorist’s plan, it would be Terror at Beslan by John Giduck. Beslan was just a dress rehearsal for what they’re planning to do to the United States,” he said.

Consider this: There are almost a half a million school buses in America. It would require almost every enlisted person and every officer in the entire United States Army to put just one armed guard on every school bus in the country.

As a country and as a culture, the level of protection Americans afford our kids against violence is nothing near what we do to protect them from fire. Grossman is correct: Denial is the enemy. We must prepare for violence like the firefighter prepares for fire. And we must do that today.

Hooah, Colonel!

About the authorDoug Wyllie is Editor in Chief of PoliceOne, responsible for setting the editorial direction of the website and managing the planned editorial features by our roster of expert writers. In addition to his editorial and managerial responsibilities, Doug has authored more than 600 feature articles and tactical tips on a wide range of topics and trends that affect the law enforcement community. Doug is a member of International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA), and an Associate Member of the California Peace Officers' Association. He is also a member of the Public Safety Writers Association, and is a two-time (2011 and 2012) Western Publishing Association "Maggie Award" Finalist in the category of Best Regularly Featured Digital Edition Column. Even in his "spare" time, he is active in his support for the law enforcement community, contributing his time and talents toward police-related charitable events as well as participating in force-on-force training, search-and-rescue training, and other scenario-based training designed to prepare cops for the fight they face every day on the street.

Jim TreacherYou might not know who Piers Morgan is, because he’s on CNN. (If you don’t know what CNN is, Google it.) He’s a British guy who hosts a show on American cable news because Larry King finally realized he was 150 years old and retired, and CNN had absolutely no idea what to do with his time slot. So far, the experiment has been a miserable ratings failure, but I’m sure Jeff Zucker doesn’t mind.

Anyway, Morgan is really excited about that football player killing his girlfriend and then himself, because it’s an excuse for Morgan to tell all us stupid Americans how backwards and pointless our Second Amendment is.

I hereby call on Mr. Morgan to publicly announce that at no point in his day is he guarded by anyone with a gun. And if he’s serious about this, he needs to pressure everyone else at CNN to make the same pledge. If he wants to get rid of guns, he needs to set an example for all of us dumb Yanks.

I just read through some of the comments, its pretty sad of course. It kind of make me wonder if the uneducated will eventually turn their eye to Martial Arts \ Artist. I know it probably wont happen but these people are afraid of legal gun owners and some people seem to consider them more of a threat than illegal gun owners.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------CNN) -- An interactive map showing the names and addresses of all handgun permit holders in New York's Westchester and Rockland counties has infuriated many readers since it was posted Saturday on a newspaper's website.

The map, published by The Journal News, allows readers to zoom in on red dots that indicate which residents are licensed to own pistols or revolvers. It had prompted more than 1,700 comments as of Wednesday morning.

Blue dots indicate permit holders who "have purchased a firearm or updated the information on a permit in the past five years."

"So should we start wearing yellow Stars of David so the general public can be aware of who we are??" one commenter wrote.

"This is crazy!" wrote another.

Fiery debate over guns in America Gun control and the 2nd Amendment Fareed's Take: Gun control Opinion: Guns endanger more than they protect

Some of those responding threatened to cancel their subscriptions or boycott the publication.

"I hope you lose readers now," one wrote.

The paper's publisher, Janet Hasson, president of the Journal News Media Group, defended the decision in a statement Wednesday.

"One of our roles is to report publicly available information on timely issues, even when unpopular. We knew publication of the database (as well as the accompanying article providing context) would be controversial, but we felt sharing information about gun permits in our area was important in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings," she said.

The newspaper also said it had wanted to publish even more information.

"We were surprised when we weren't able to obtain information on what kinds and how many weapons people in our market own," the newspaper said in a statement.

County clerks' offices had told the paper that "the public does not have the right to see specific permits an individual has been issued, the types of handguns a person possesses or the number of guns he or she owns," the statement said. "Had we been able to obtain those records, we would have published them."

The map came about in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, The Journal News said.

"In the past week, conversation on our opinion pages and on our website, LoHud.com, has been keenly focused on gun control," the newspaper's editor and vice president, CynDee Royle, said in a statement Tuesday.

The names and addresses of the two counties' permit-holding residents were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The website notes that the map does not indicate whether the residents own handguns, only that they are legally able to, and that the data do not pertain to rifles or shotguns, which can be bought without a permit.

NRA doubles down: New gun laws won't work

Still, hundreds of residents were shocked to see their information posted without their being notified. Some said the map would prompt burglaries because thieves are now aware of where weapons might be found.

"Now everyone knows where the legal guns are kept, a valuable piece of information for criminals," a commenter wrote. "Why don't you do something helpful, like trying to find out where the illegal guns are kept?"

A great majority of readers commenting at CNN.com were opposed to the newspaper's move, but some defended it on the grounds that the public has a right to know who might own weapons.

One commenter wrote: "If you're a gun owner it's a matter of public record. If you're embarrassed by your gun, get rid of it. I have a car and a house -- they're no secret. People contact me all the time trying to sell me stuff. I don't expect a right to privacy for these things."

Another wrote, "Every gun manufactured, transferred, and sold should be on the internet, all on one website, including date of purchase, current owner, stored location, and gun license number."

Several Twitter commenters also came out in support in tweets to CNN:

-- "The gun permit maps are an effective way of showing how horribly widespread gun ownership is."

-- "please thank them. This could be a turning point. I do not want my daughter playing in a house with guns."

-- "LOVE the Gun License map! Excellent information to anyone concerned with who they live around!"

The Journal News argued that residents have a right to access information regarding weapon holders in Westchester and Rockland communities.

"Our readers are understandably interested to know about guns in their neighborhoods," Royle said in her statement.

In an article about the uproar, The Journal News says many of the thousands of people who "have taken to their computers and phones in rage" live outside the counties covered by the map.

In searching through hundreds of comments listed on the website, CNN did not immediately see any in support of the newspaper's decision to publish the interactive map.

The Journal News said it published an article in 2006 that received similar responses, but this time around, social media spread the story far and wide.

In 2007, roanoke.com, the website of The Roanoke Times, published a list of Virginians licensed to carry concealed weapons, and then deleted it the next day. The paper explained that the list, originally published as part of an opinion column, was removed "out of concern that it might include names that should not have been made public."

The Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, notes that some other news agencies have published various types of databases as well.

"Publishing gun owners' names makes them targets for theft or public ridicule. It is journalistic arrogance to abuse public record privilege, just as it is to air 911 calls for no reason or to publish the home addresses of police or judges without cause," Al Tompkins, a Poynter senior faculty member, said in a statement Wednesday. "Unwarranted publishing of the names of permitted owners just encourages gun owners to skip the permitting."

The paper said Royle was not available for interviews Wednesday.

Little common ground between pro- and anti-gun forces

« Last Edit: December 26, 2012, 04:07:04 PM by Robertlk808 »

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"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed

Joyce Lee Malcolm: Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control After a school massacre, the U.K. banned handguns in 1998. A decade later, handgun crime had doubled..Article Comments (794) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».smaller Larger facebooktwittergoogle pluslinked ininShare.5EmailPrintSave ↓ More ..smaller Larger By JOYCE LEE MALCOLM Americans are determined that massacres such as happened in Newtown, Conn., never happen again. But how? Many advocate more effective treatment of mentally-ill people or armed protection in so-called gun-free zones. Many others demand stricter control of firearms.

We aren't alone in facing this problem. Great Britain and Australia, for example, suffered mass shootings in the 1980s and 1990s. Both countries had very stringent gun laws when they occurred. Nevertheless, both decided that even stricter control of guns was the answer. Their experiences can be instructive.

In 1987, Michael Ryan went on a shooting spree in his small town of Hungerford, England, killing 16 people (including his mother) and wounding another 14 before shooting himself. Since the public was unarmed—as were the police—Ryan wandered the streets for eight hours with two semiautomatic rifles and a handgun before anyone with a firearm was able to come to the rescue.

Nine years later, in March 1996, Thomas Hamilton, a man known to be mentally unstable, walked into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and shot 16 young children and their teacher. He wounded 10 other children and three other teachers before taking his own life.

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CloseDavid Klein .Since 1920, anyone in Britain wanting a handgun had to obtain a certificate from his local police stating he was fit to own a weapon and had good reason to have one. Over the years, the definition of "good reason" gradually narrowed. By 1969, self-defense was never a good reason for a permit.

After Hungerford, the British government banned semiautomatic rifles and brought shotguns—the last type of firearm that could be purchased with a simple show of fitness—under controls similar to those in place for pistols and rifles. Magazines were limited to two shells with a third in the chamber.

Dunblane had a more dramatic impact. Hamilton had a firearm certificate, although according to the rules he should not have been granted one. A media frenzy coupled with an emotional campaign by parents of Dunblane resulted in the Firearms Act of 1998, which instituted a nearly complete ban on handguns. Owners of pistols were required to turn them in. The penalty for illegal possession of a pistol is up to 10 years in prison.

The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.

Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens who have come into the possession of a firearm, even accidentally, have been harshly treated. In 2009 a former soldier, Paul Clarke, found a bag in his garden containing a shotgun. He brought it to the police station and was immediately handcuffed and charged with possession of the gun. At his trial the judge noted: "In law there is no dispute that Mr. Clarke has no defence to this charge. The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant." Mr. Clarke was sentenced to five years in prison. A public outcry eventually won his release.

In November of this year, Danny Nightingale, member of a British special forces unit in Iraq and Afghanistan, was sentenced to 18 months in military prison for possession of a pistol and ammunition. Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action. Mr. Nightingale pleaded guilty to avoid a five-year sentence and was in prison until an appeal and public outcry freed him on Nov. 29.

***Six weeks after the Dunblane massacre in 1996, Martin Bryant, an Australian with a lifelong history of violence, attacked tourists at a Port Arthur prison site in Tasmania with two semiautomatic rifles. He killed 35 people and wounded 21 others.

At the time, Australia's guns laws were stricter than the United Kingdom's. In lieu of the requirement in Britain that an applicant for permission to purchase a gun have a "good reason," Australia required a "genuine reason." Hunting and protecting crops from feral animals were genuine reasons—personal protection wasn't.

With new Prime Minister John Howard in the lead, Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement, banning all semiautomatic rifles and semiautomatic and pump-action shotguns and imposing a more restrictive licensing system on other firearms. The government also launched a forced buyback scheme to remove thousands of firearms from private hands. Between Oct. 1, 1996, and Sept. 30, 1997, the government purchased and destroyed more than 631,000 of the banned guns at a cost of $500 million.

To what end? While there has been much controversy over the result of the law and buyback, Peter Reuter and Jenny Mouzos, in a 2003 study published by the Brookings Institution, found homicides "continued a modest decline" since 1997. They concluded that the impact of the National Firearms Agreement was "relatively small," with the daily rate of firearms homicides declining 3.2%.

According to their study, the use of handguns rather than long guns (rifles and shotguns) went up sharply, but only one out of 117 gun homicides in the two years following the 1996 National Firearms Agreement used a registered gun. Suicides with firearms went down but suicides by other means went up. They reported "a modest reduction in the severity" of massacres (four or more indiscriminate homicides) in the five years since the government weapons buyback. These involved knives, gas and arson rather than firearms.

In 2008, the Australian Institute of Criminology reported a decrease of 9% in homicides and a one-third decrease in armed robbery since the 1990s, but an increase of over 40% in assaults and 20% in sexual assaults.

What to conclude? Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven't made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don't provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems.

Ms. Malcolm, a professor of law at George Mason University Law School, is the author of several books including "Guns and Violence: The English Experience," (Harvard, 2002).

It's nice that we're finally talking about gun control. It's very sad that it took such a terrible tragedy to talk about it, but I'm glad the conversation is happening. I hear a lot about assault weapon and large magazine bans, and whilst I'm supportive of that, it won't solve the problem. The vast majority of firearm deaths occur with handguns. Only about 5% of people killed by guns are killed by guns which would be banned in any foreseeable AWB.

Furthermore, there seems to be no talk about high powered rifles. What gun nuts don't want you to know is many target and hunting rifles are chambered in the same round (.223/5.56mm) that Lanza's assault weapon was. Even more guns are chambered for more powerful rounds, like the .30-06 or (my personal "favorite") 7.62x54R. Even a .22, the smallest round manufactured on a large scale, can kill easily. In fact, some say the .22 kills more people than any other round out there.

Again, I like that we're talking about assault weapons, machine guns, and high capacity clips. But it only takes one bullet out of one gun to kill a person. Remember the beltway sniper back in 2002? The one who killed a dozen odd people? Even though he used a bushmaster assault rifle, he only fired one round at a time before moving. He could have used literally any rifle sold in the US for his attacks.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can't. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it:

The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them. Canada has a national firearms registry. We need to copy their model. We need a law demanding all firearms be registered to a national database. We need to know who has them and where they are. We need to make this as easy as possible for gun owners. The federal government provides the money and technical expertise, and the State police carry it out. Like a funded mandate. Most firearms already have a serial number on them, so it would really be a matter of taking the information already on the ATF form 4473 and putting it in a national database. I think about 6 months should be enough time.

Along with this, make private sales illegal. When a firearm is transferred, make it law that the registration must be updated. Again, make it super easy to do. Perhaps over, the internet. Dealers can log in by their FFLs and update the registration. Additionally, new guns are to be registered by the manufacturer. The object here is to create a clear paper trail from factory to distributor to dealer to owner. We want to encourage as much voluntary compliance as possible.

Now we get down to it. The registration period has passed. Now we have criminals without registered guns running around. Probably kooky types that "lost" them on a boat or something. So remember those ATF form 4473s? Those record every firearm sale, going back twenty years. And those have to be surrendered to the ATF on demand. So, we get those logbooks, and cross reference the names and addresses with the new national registry. Since most NRA types own two or (many) more guns, we can get an idea of who properly registered their guns and who didn't. For example, if we have a guy who purchased 6 guns over the course of 10 years, but only registered two of them, that raises a red flag.

Now, maybe he sold them or they got lost or something. But it gives us a good target for investigation. A nice visit by the ATF or state police to find out if he really does still have those guns would be certainly warranted. It's certainly not perfect. People may have gotten guns from parents or family, and not registered them. Perfect is the enemy of pretty darn good, as they say. This exercise isn't so much to track down every gun ever sold; the main idea would be to profile and investigate people that may not have registered their guns. As an example, I'm not so concerned with the guy who bought that bolt action Mauser a decade ago and doesn't have anything registered to his name. It's a pretty good possibility that he sold it, gave it away, or got rid of it somehow. And even if he didn't, that guy is not who I'm concerned with. I'm concerned that other guy who bought a half dozen assault weapons, registered two hunting rifles, and belongs to the NRA/GOA. He's the guy who warrants a raid.

So registration is the first step. Now that the vast majority are registered, we can do what we will. One good first step would be to close the registry to new registrations. This would, in effect, prevent new guns from being made or imported. This would put the murder machine corporations out of business for good, and cut the money supply to the NRA/GOA. As money dries up, the political capital needed for new controls will be greatly reduced.

There are a few other things I would suggest. I would suggest an immediate, national ban on concealed carry. A ban on internet sales of guns and ammunition is a no brainer. Microstamping would also be a very good thing. Even if the only thing it does is drive up costs, it could still lead to crimes being solved. I'm willing to try every advantage we can get.

A national Firearms Owner Identification Card might be good, but I'm not sure if it's necessary if we have a national database. We should also insist on comprehensive insurance and mandatory gun safes, subject to random, spot checks by local and federal law enforcement.

We must make guns expensive and unpopular, just like cigarettes. A nationwide, antigun campaign paid for by a per gun yearly tax paid by owners, dealers, and manufacturers would work well in this regard. We should also segway into an anti-hunting campaign, like those in the UK. By making hunting expensive and unpopular, we can make the transition to a gun free society much less of a headache for us.

I know this seems harsh, but this is the only way we can be truly safe. I don't want my kids being shot at by a deranged NRA member. I'm sure you don't either. So lets stop looking for short term solutions and start looking long term. Registration is the first step.

Tell Pres. Obama and democrats in congress to demand mandatory, comprehensive gun registration. It's the only way we can ban guns with any effectiveness.

Press releasesFeinstein to Introduce Updated Assault Weapons Bill in New Congress, December 17, 2012Feinstein Statement on Connecticut School Shooting, December 14, 2012Summary of 2013 legislationFollowing is a summary of the 2013 legislation:

Bans the sale, transfer, importation, or manufacturing of:120 specifically-named firearms;Certain other semiautomatic rifles, handguns, shotguns that can accept a detachable magazine and have one or more military characteristics; andSemiautomatic rifles and handguns with a fixed magazine that can accept more than 10 rounds.Strengthens the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban and various state bans by:Moving from a 2-characteristic test to a 1-characteristic test;Eliminating the easy-to-remove bayonet mounts and flash suppressors from the characteristics test; andBanning firearms with “thumbhole stocks” and “bullet buttons” to address attempts to “work around” prior bans.Bans large-capacity ammunition feeding devices capable of accepting more than 10 rounds. Protects legitimate hunters and the rights of existing gun owners by:Grandfathering weapons legally possessed on the date of enactment;Exempting over 900 specifically-named weapons used for hunting or sporting purposes; andExempting antique, manually-operated, and permanently disabled weapons.Requires that grandfathered weapons be registered under the National Firearms Act, to include:Background check of owner and any transferee;Type and serial number of the firearm;Positive identification, including photograph and fingerprint;Certification from local law enforcement of identity and that possession would not violate State or local law; andDedicated funding for ATF to implement registration.A pdf of the bill summary is available here.

Effectiveness of 1994-2004 Assault Weapons BanFollowing are studies that have been conducted on the 1994-2004 Assault Weapons Ban:

In a Department of Justice study (pdf), Jeffrey Roth and Christopher Koper find that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was responsible for a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal. They write: “Assault weapons are disproportionately involved in murders with multiple victims, multiple wounds per victim, and police officers as victims.”Original source (page 2): Jeffrey A. Roth & Christopher S. Koper, “Impact Evaluation of the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994,” The Urban Institute (March 1997).In a University of Pennsylvania study (pdf), Christopher Koper reports that the use of assault weapons in crime declined by more than two-thirds by about nine years after 1994 Assault Weapons Ban took effect.Original source (page 46): Christopher S. Koper, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003” (June 2004).In a Washington Post story, reporters David Fallis and James Grimaldi write that the percentage of firearms seized by police in Virginia with high-capacity magazines dropped significantly during the Assault Weapons Ban. That figure has doubled since the ban expired.Original source: In Virginia, high-yield clip seizures rise. By David S. Fallis and James V. Grimaldi, Washington Post.In a letter to the editor in the American Journal of Public Health (pdf), Douglas Weil and Rebecca Knox explain that when Maryland imposed a more stringent ban on assault pistols and high-capacity magazines in 1994, it led to a 55 percent drop in assault pistols recovered by the Baltimore Police Department.Original source (pages 297-298): Douglas S. Weil & Rebecca C. Knox, "Letter to the Editor, The Maryland Ban on the Sale of Assault Pistols and High-Capacity Magazines: Estimating the Impact in Baltimore," 87 American Journal of Public Health 2, Feb. 1997, at 297-98.A recent study by the Violence Policy Center finds that between 2005 and 2007, one in four law enforcement officers slain in the line of duty was killed with an assault weapon.Original source (pages 6-7): Violence Policy Center, "Target: Law Enforcement—Assault Weapons in the News," (Feb. 2010).A report by the Police Executive Research Forum finds that 37 percent of police departments reported seeing a noticeable increase in criminals’ use of assault weapons since the Assault Weapons Ban expired.Original source (page 2): Police Executive Research Forum, "Guns and Crime: Breaking New Ground by Focusing on the Local Impact," (May 2010).

Chicago has been a shining city on a hill for gun-grabbers for decades. In fact, so extreme is the gun control in the Windy City that prior to the 2010 Supreme Court decision in McDonald v. Chicago, you couldn't even have a gun in your own house with which to defend yourself or your family.In other words, a Chicago home owner was like a public school teacher -- he had to sit defenseless with his fingers crossed and simply hope the criminals didn't target his house on a given day or night.

Even now, after the McDonald decision, you have jump through myriad hoops to get a gun. And, although they are working on it, concealed carry has yet to be legalized.

So in a gun-control-utopia such as this, you'd expect school-age children to be safe from all harm, if you buy into the theories of Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Yet the truth is more than 440 school-age children have been shot in Chicago in 2012. This is not to say that 440 school-age children died, simply that more than 440 school-age children were at least wounded. The number of school-age children killed is reported at approximately 60.

These numbers are well above those for the 2011-2012 school year, in which 319 Chicago students were wounded and another 24 were killed.

The bottom line: It seems that denying the free exercise of the right to keep and bear arms to law-abiding citizens not only does not curtail the actions of criminals, but actually emboldens them.

On Friday, filmmaker Michael Moore used his Twitter account to criticize the National Rifle Association's "National School Safety Shield" program. While Moore has a problem with an armed guard protecting every school, he doesn't seem to have a problem with an armed guard protecting him.

The filmmaker, who rose to prominence with documentaries like the anti-gun Bowling for Columbine, often travels with a bodyguard, which is reasonable, considering his level of celebrity. That decision, however, led to an awkward situation in 2005 when his bodyguard was detained at JFK Airport in New York - for carrying a gun.

The story has again resurfaced as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut has made gun control an issue again. Moore himself stepped into the fray by posting various anti-gun messages on Twitter. "Armed guards in schools? Hmmmm... Oh! That's why the 2 armed guards that were at Columbine HS that day were able to prevent the 15 deaths?" he tweeted Friday. On Tuesday, Moore tweeted the following statement: "Guns are for hunters...and cowards."

There have been those who claim the 2005 story is untrue, but they are only partially correct. Initial reports that the bodyguard was arrested were not correct. The bodyguard was not arrested, and did declare to a screener that he had an unloaded handgun, which he had a permit for. However, he refused to check it into luggage, and insisted he be allowed to carry it with him on the plane. After being briefly detained to argue his case, the bodyguard was reportedly not allowed to carry it on his person. The fact that he does carry a gun to protect Moore is still true.

It isn't the first time an anti-gun liberal has been caught being a hypocrite. California Senator Diane Feinstein has been critical of those advocating for increased concealed handgun access, but she admitted to having a concealed handgun permit in 1995.

After saying the National Rifle Association doesn't care about children killed by guns, but only for "white, Republican life," it was revealed that Rosie O'Donnell's bodyguard carries a gun. She angrily blamed gun rights supporters for spreading the truth only to shame her.

More than 150 Utah teachers, school workers attend concealed weapons class Connecticut shooting » Class more popular now than ever. By lisa schencker| The Salt Lake TribuneFirst Published 42 minutes ago • Updated 1 minute ago More than 150 Utah teachers and school workers took time off from their winter breaks Thursday to attend a free class on how to carry concealed weapons and respond to mass violence such as the recent shooting in a Connecticut school.

It’s a course that’s been offered to Utah educators for more than a decade, but Thursday it attracted about 10 times as many people as usual, said Clark Aposhian, an instructor with Fairwarning Training and a chairman of the Utah Shooting Sports Council, which hosted the class with OPSGEAR. Aposhian said organizers had to turn away about 40 or 50 people for lack of space.

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Join the Discussion Post a Comment Read All Comments (5) He credited the course’s sudden popularity to increased media attention on the class and its timing, coming just weeks after a gunman’s massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school killed 20 children and six adults.

Aposhian said parents and school employees in Utah and across the nation felt "utterly helpless" when they saw the tragedy that unfolded in Newtown.

"We want to give school employees one more option to protect themselves and their students," Aposhian said of the class, which went over the basics of how to respond to an attack, carrying concealed weapons and applying for concealed weapon permits.

"You’re never going to get all the mentally and criminally insane people off the streets, and you’re never going to be able to disarm all the criminals, so logically what do you do?"

Utah is one of two states that already allows concealed weapons permit holders to carry firearms on school grounds. The other state is Kansas.

The class came about a week after the National Rifle Association called for armed police officers in every school, and at least one Utah lawmaker, Rep. Curt Oda, R-Clearfield, asserted that more armed teachers would make classrooms safer.

Those positions have garnered much controversy in Utah and across the country. The nation’s two largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, have said that arming educators won’t improve school safety and that "guns have no place in our schools." The groups have instead called for a renewed focus on bullying prevention, mental health services and gun control.

But educators who packed a conference room at the Maverik Center on Thursday had a decidedly different view."When you are in a building full of kids all day anything can happen," said Kelli Stebbins, a technology teacher at East Midvale Elementary. She said it’s not realistic to think that a attack like the one in Connecticut couldn’t happen here.

"It can happen, and it will happen, and I’d rather be on the prepared side than the not-prepared side," Stebbins said.

Richard Summers, a sixth-grade teacher at Copper Hills Elementary in Magna, said after the shooting some of his students asked him what he would have done in that situation. He said he would have given his life to help them. Several of those who died in Connecticut were educators protecting their students.

"Certainly the incident in Connecticut," Summers said, "makes us want to be aware and know what to do."

Rachel Bateman, a fourth-grade teacher at Early Light Academy in South Jordan, said she also attended the class because she wanted to be prepared. Part of the course included instruction in awareness and other ways to respond to classroom attacks, such as gouging an attacker’s eyes, choking an attacker and how to hide.

Bateman said she hadn’t yet decided Thursday whether she would want to carry a gun in the classroom.

"I want to be able to protect my kids, my students, and people in the building, but on the other hand, different variables come with concealing a weapon," Bateman said, noting she might be worried, for example, that a student would feel a gun while hugging her.

Teachers weren’t the only ones to take advantage of the free class Thursday. Administrators, bus drivers, secretaries and others were also among those taking notes.

"If anything were to happen, I’ve got a large responsibility," said Scott Huntington, a custodian at Shelley Elementary in American Fork. "I don’t have just a single classroom. I’ve got the whole school to think about."

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Join the Discussion Post a Comment Read All Comments (5) Alpine School District bus driver Greg Lewis said he’s always wanted a permit, and he’d likely carry a gun on his bus if district policy allows it.

And Julie Wootan, a front office receptionist at Paradigm High in South Jordan, said she’s also been wanting a permit for a while and the events of this month encouraged her to finally get it.

"We’re the first place where they would walk by," Wootan said of her position in the front office. She said school employees should always be allowed to protect those around them.

Those who led the course Thursday emphasized that whether those in attendance pursued concealed carry permits or not, just by attending they were becoming more aware of how to protect themselves.

"This is definitely a message that you in the education program are definitely sending to not only our legislature, to our local government," Bill Pedersen, a board member with the Utah Shooting Sports Council, told those in attendance, "but to all those around the states."

Aposhian said the class will likely be offered again during the next school break.

"You see, it's not the blood you spill that gets you what you want, it's the blood you share. Your family, your friendships, your community, these are the most valuable things a man can have." Before Dishonor - Hatebreed